Look Left – Paolo Di Canio, Michael Philpott and making work pay…by cutting the minimum wage

James Bloodworth looks back at the week’s politics, including our progressive, regressive and evidence of the week.

To receive Look Left in your inbox before it appears on the website, sign up to the Left Foot Forward email service

• Paolo Di Canio, an Italian footballer-turned manager who once declared himself a “fascist”, was appointed as the manager of Sunderland Football Club this week, provoking a storm of protest from supporters and the resignation of its most famous board member, David Miliband.

Di Canio has the word “Dux”, the Latin equivalent of “Duce”, tattooed on his arm and has in the past been pictured giving straight arm Roman salutes to fans.

“I give the straight arm salute because it is a salute from a ‘camerata’ to ‘camerati’,” Di Canio said after one incident for which he was fined seven thousand Euros, making sure to use the Italian words for members of Benito Mussolini’s fascist movement.

Philpott, one Mail columnist said, “is a perfect parable for our age”. His trial “lifted the lid on the bleak and often grotesque world of the welfare benefit scroungers – of whom there are not dozens, not hundreds, but tens of thousands in our country”.

• In its drive to reduce the welfare bill the coalition likes to cite the importance of “making work pay”. The chancellor George Osborne said this week that welfare reforms are “about making sure that we use every penny we can to back hard-working people who want to get on in life. This month we will make work pay”.

Yet astonishingly, it was reported on Tuesday that the minimum wage could be frozen by the government if the economic downturn continues. So much for making work pay.

Dom Aversano started a petition to get Iain Duncan Smith to try to live on £53 a week after the secretary for work and pensions claimed he could live on that amount if he had to.

The petition has so far attracted over 300,000 signatories. While superficially little more than a stunt, the petition does draw attention to the distance between the lives of some of our policymakers and those who they govern.

Daily Mail columnist A.N Wilson this week tried to pin the blame for the deaths of six children in a housefire caused by Michael Philpott on the welfare state rather than on the man who actually started the fire.

Like so many right-wing political commentators Mr Wilson applies the principle of personal responsibility selectively and when it suits: a man who burned his house down is a “product of the welfare state” whereas those who receive benefits through no fault of their own are lumped together with Philpott as “scroungers”.

Left Foot Forward’s James Bloodworth was on the airwaves this week arguing that it was obscene to try and blame one man’s evil on a system that helps so many.

Evidence of the Week:

Figures released over the weekend showed that families are on average £891 worse off because of tax rises and cuts to tax credits and benefits introduced since 2010.

Based on data published by the independent Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) in its Green Budget in February and its post Budget briefing earlier this month, the figures show the extent to which living standards are being squeezed by George Osborne’s policy of austerity.

5 Responses to “Look Left – Paolo Di Canio, Michael Philpott and making work pay…by cutting the minimum wage”

Mr Helpful

Remember, ‘rightie’ chums, this site could damage your health, causing migraines, heart palpitations and violent wind. Your constitutions are simply not built for this kind of ‘abuse’. No matter who well its is written, how much statistical information is given or credible experts are quoted you are incapable of seeing it as nothing more than the acrid bottom wind of Vlad Lenin himself.
Only a large dose of Murdoch’s sunshine can ease your pains.